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Emulate music from radio speakers

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to shoot a little scene in the following days. The scene takes places in a parking lot and involves people talking while rap music is being played from a car nearby.

Now I'll be adding the song in post but how make the "studio quality MP3" sound like it's coming out of radio using only premiere pro (I have Audition but I've never ever used it).

I thought of a chap way to do it, record the music being played on radio with a mic and hope it sounds like it should but I'd rather do it in post.
 
Probably the least expensive way for you to do it is to "Worldize" the track. Park a car that can playback the track someplace quiet, play the song from the car stereo and record the results. Record several different perspectives - up close, middle distance, long distance - to give yourself options for audio post.

In audio post make sure that you have all four version (the three you recorded plus the original) lined up exactly so you can change and/or mix perspectives as you need to.

Of course you can always use SpeakerPhone and Altiverb ........
 
You could also, for a very clean result, use panning, reverb and a filter. You'd need to have knowledge of mixing and all that jazz to get it to sound perfect though so ask the guy who's doing your sound if he can do it.
 
I really know nothing about sound except what I learn everyday in here. I picked up a Zoom first then Alcove explained that dialogue has to be recorded mono because people had one mouth so I got a VideoMic. And that's about it.

What type of guy should I be looking for ? I'm in engineering school and don't have access to a lot of "profiles", for now I'm really a one man team on the technical side. I make people hold reflectors and booms for me and nobody is showing any interest in the technical aspect. I'm still looking though. Do you think a DJ is enough into sound to be able to help ?


Anyway, thank you for the options.
 
My assumption is that he's doing it all "DIY." If he had an audio post guy he probably wouldn't ask the question - we audio post types have all (most likely) used EQs, dynamic processing and reverbs to do emulations before we had the budget for the fun, time-saving, control freak toys like SpeakerPhone & Altiverb.

The reason that I recommend worldizing is that A) it doesn't cost anything but time if you have a recorder and a mic, and B) it sounds authentic.

Worldizing has a very long tradition, and a (very) few of the "old school" audio post houses still have their Futz Rooms. These are room filled with various speakers for playback of music & sound FX and a few mics to record the results.
 
Try Alcove Audio's idea first if you can. If you can't, send me a sample of speech recorded in the same space (and any other sounds) and I'll do it for you. You'll still have to do all the finalisation on your end though, the typical post sound stuff. I'm just a music producer. ;)

Also you'll have to tell me how far away the speaker is supposed to be and roughly how big the room is.
 
...send me a sample of speech recorded in the same space (and any other sounds) and I'll do it for you. You'll still have to do all the finalisation on your end though, the typical post sound stuff.

With all due respect, this is one of the common mistakes made by people in audio post by those who only have experience of music production. Reverb in music production is almost always an abstract concept but this is not the case in audio post. There will be either natural or digital reverb on the sync dialogue (or ADR), digital reverb on the Foley and digital reverb on any other foreground or background SFX. All the reverb therefore has to be applied by the re-recording mixer (or whoever is acting as the re-recording mixer) otherwise all the different digital reverbs (and/or digital delays) will confuse the sound-scape and make it sound unnatural rather than the other way around! No EQ, reverb or any other effects (like EQ or compression for example) should ever be added by anyone other than the re-recording mixer. An analogy to the music business: How would you feel about mixing a song, where different reverbs and effects (EQ, compression, etc.) had already been recorded to each track by several different tracking engineers all working on different parts of the same song? In other words, the two sentences I've quoted above are (or should be) mutually exclusive!

Your offer is generous but if the OP wants to create a mix he/she is going to need to start learning how to mix. The dirty way (less realistic than either of Alcove's suggestions) is for the OP to place a low pass filter (LPF) on the radio sample, with a setting of about 900Hz to start with and adjust it up and down until it sounds close to what is desired. It will probably need some EQ boost in the low frequencies as well. Then the application of the same reverb/digital delay being used on any Foley/other SFX in the scene in the amount which sounds right.

G
 
My assumption is that he's doing it all "DIY." If he had an audio post guy he probably wouldn't ask the question - we audio post types have all (most likely) used EQs, dynamic processing and reverbs to do emulations before we had the budget for the fun, time-saving, control freak toys like SpeakerPhone & Altiverb.

The reason that I recommend worldizing is that A) it doesn't cost anything but time if you have a recorder and a mic, and B) it sounds authentic.

Worldizing has a very long tradition, and a (very) few of the "old school" audio post houses still have their Futz Rooms. These are room filled with various speakers for playback of music & sound FX and a few mics to record the results.



Thank you Alcove that's really helpful and instructive. I like the fact it's an industry thing so I'm gonna go with that. I just need to understand what exactly I'm a supposed to do after lining the four tracks on my timeline. Mixing is for me a vague notion at best. Is it when you switch between these tracks to keep the volume consistent with the camera moves ? I'm gonna research a tutorial on the very basics on mixing.

Again, thank you.
 
My point about him sending me samples of the speech and other ambient noise was actually to get the closest possible reverb on my end since I have a lot of impulses (convolution reverb). I could probably get a close enough match. Since he's doing this all by himself I doubt it's headed for the big screen so it's not such a big deal. And like I said, he'd still have to do the finalisation his end. :)

But yeah, I'm sure it wouldn't be perfect, but in his position I'm not sure perfection is possible when it comes to these kinds of things.
 
It's just a little thing. i'm trying to recruit people for the "video club". When I took over, it was an abandoned place. The short needs to be as good as possible to impress them enough and make them want to be a part of it. The audience is students not producers and they're easily impressed. Still, this is also a challenge for me to learn something new and make it work.

(A challenge even harder when I have to shoot it tuesday, edit on wednesday and present on thursday).
 
I like the fact it's an industry thing so I'm gonna go with that. I just need to understand what exactly I'm a supposed to do after lining the four tracks on my timeline. Mixing is for me a vague notion at best. Is it when you switch between these tracks to keep the volume consistent with the camera moves ? I'm gonna research a tutorial on the very basics on mixing.

It's not really an industry thing much any more. It used to be, before the we had the range and quality of software plugins we do now. It's too time consuming for the industry these days but as owning and using these software tools is more of a problem for you rather than time, Alcove is right in saying worldizing represents your best bet.

How you use the four tracks Alcove suggested recording is largely an artistic decision and so no one can give you the "right" answer. Play each of the 4 recordings with your dialogue and decide which produces the best perspective relative to your camera angle/s baring in mind: 1. How prominent you want this sound effect to appear and 2. How loud the dialogue is and how much attention you want to divert from the dialogue. Once you've chosen the recording/s which best fit the perspective and your other requirements, you can adjust the level of this effect, along with the levels of any other Foley, ambiances and effects to keep your dialogue intelligible. This is also where you fine tune every element of your mix with EQ, compression reverb and/or delay to create the illusion of depth (and therefore realism) in your mix.

G
 
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